Hoof Steps in the Dark

by Fuzzyfurvert

Lost

Chapter 2

“Were there this many stairs here last time? This staircase seems unnecessarily long.” Twilight chuckled nervously to herself as she crept up the long spiral stairs to the Elements’ Chamber in the castle of the two sisters. No matter how much giggling she’d done, the feeling of being watched wouldn’t abate and her knees grew increasingly shaky.

Her horn’s glow banished the shadows, but only so far as the eternally receding curve of the crumbling stone wall to her left. The stairs climbed on into a dark inversion of Tartarus as the cool air of the evening gave way to the outright cold of an autumn night. The only sounds were Twilight’s own breathing and the soft clap of her hooves on stone.

The stairs kept going. Twilight’s legs were beginning to protest. Had the stairs been this long before, when she’d ran up them to find the Elements of Harmony all those years ago? Had it only been four years? It felt like forever ago. Was she on the right staircase? This couldn’t be right. There should have been a landing by now.

Twilight slowed and sucked in a deep breath of the chill air. It made her chest burn and took her mind off her legs for a moment. This is wrong. This can’t be right. Did I walk into a trap of some sort that keeps you walking in place forever? What if I can’t get out of it? How long would it take the others to notice I’m gone and then find me?

Twilight felt her breathing quicken in lockstep with her heartrate. She was just slowing to a complete stop when the landing she’d been seeking rounded the corner and teased her with a place to rest her hooves. She let out a sudden laugh, the tension gone for a moment as she spied her destination, and she galloped the remaining steps and leapt on to the landing with all the force and sudden joy of a foal in a field of rain puddles.

“Aha!” Twilight laughed again and dropped into a seated position to catch her breath.

The large chamber beyond the landing stretched away into darkness, swallowed by the night. Twilight knew large bay windows lined the chamber and part of the roof was collapsed and open to the outside, but she saw no stars or the moon. She did feel much more a breeze here and leaves, dry and spread out on the wide floor of the chamber rustled faintly.

“There are...er, where...eight support pillars. The third pillar on the right side is collapsed, broken into seven pieces.” She recited quietly as the memories of that fateful day out in her mind. “There is a dias at the opposite end of the room, raised one step. It takes a full three seconds at full gallop to cover the distance from here to the dias. Call it...thirty yards, which is structurally consistent with the ballroom on the ground floor.”

Her voice sounded flat. Absorbed by the absolute darkness of night as greedily as the futile glow from her horn was. “There is a stand on the dias that rests in a sunken base. It should still be surrounded by the rubble of the false Elements of Harmony that Nightma…” Twilight swallowed dryly. “Nightmare Moon destroyed.”

Twilight picked herself up and pushed more power into her horn to form a glowing orb of light that could be directed independently. Then she created three more and sent all four out into the room to spread her illumination as much as she could. She stood at the door and watched her tiny lights float along like giant fireflies. They drifted past the broken windows and fallen ceiling, their pinpoints of light picking out and casting deeper shadows as they went.

It was filled with more leaves that shivered under the touch of a cold autumn breeze, but the room was as she had left it all those years previous. There was even a hint of dark stain to the stone tile where the manifest power of the Elements had struck Nightmare Moon down. Twilight stayed well away from the spot as she relived the moment of her greatest triumph.

She could remember the voices of her friends, the overwhelming presence of a mad goddess and her own madness as she started to charge that same goddess armed with nothing but her horn and a wild guess at the villainess’ goad-ableness. It paid off in the long run. In a single fell swoop Princess Luna was returned to the world and Twilight and her friends were named heroes. Changelings and Chaos Spirits and power mad Centurians were nothing after that, really.

She sighed and hung her head for a moment before turning around. “I guess it was nothing. I’ve spent the better part of the night just scaring myself. I need to go get that tapestry I left downstairs and get home before they girls come searching.”

Twilight snuffed her witchlights one by one as she headed back toward the entrance, her hoofsteps echoing against the floor. She paused as she released the last light and was plunged once more into total darkness. Leaves rustled as the breeze picked up and the hair on her neck and spine rose to stand on end. Twilight shivered in the cold and then froze.

Her hoof steps were still echoing through the chamber.

The wind turned frigid as swirling dust devils of dead leaves blew past her. When it died down again a moment later, her breath misted into a little puff of condensation. Her heart thudded in her chest and her blood pulsed loudly in her ears as she turned and looked back into the empty room. Her horn light barely illuminated further than her hoof could reach. The night loomed over her like a silent and impenetrable weight, hungry for all the light and sound she could feed it.

“He..hell..o?” Twilight tried to hold the clatter of her teeth back unsuccessfully. “Is somepony there?”

The rustle and crunch of dead leaves was her only answer.

Rarity was just going to have to wait on that musty old tapestry. She fired up her horn and ran the calculations for mass and distance and the rotation speed of the planet. It wasn’t as precise as she liked, but the end point for her teleportation spell was within an acceptable walking distance of her castle in Ponyville. She opened the rift in reality and let herself be pulled through. It took a moment for the world to right itself, but in that moment just as she passed from the logical and measurable plane of existence to the realms of arcane energies, Twilight saw a black blot in the vague shape of a pony there in the room with her.

She saw it and as soon as she crashed into the dumpsters behind Sugar Cube Corner, she knew it had seen her in return.

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[Lotus Moon]